Zoekveld

Finishing my first week at Acquia

I am just finishing my first week at Acquia, boy what a rocket ride! As you may have heard, read or known, Acquia is making connection with its roots - Europe. As you may have also probably heard or known, Acquia has recently established operations in the UK, the overall aim of which is to serve customers from all over the Europe.

To give you a bit of a my background, its time for some sweet memories:
I discovered Drupal few years ago when making a simple site for my wife (an online magazine for people with diabetes), and you may say that ‘I came for the code and stayed for the community’. In fact, I started the Czech Drupal community around the online hotpot drupal.cz website and helped promoting Drupal in the Czech and Slovak region (Czechoslovakia reunited). After leaving home sweet home for an even sweeter home in London around a year ago and looking retrospectively at the community, I am now confident that I succeeded in evangelization of Czechoslovak CMS users, considering there are now 2 drupal-related events every month in Prague, one in Brno (near Slovak border), and the community site itself is open-sourced on github.com.

As you can imagine, joining Acquia as a Director of Professional Services for Europe represents indeed a big step up in my career after starting a business on my own, which focused on helping digital agencies with their Drupal clients. Thus, joining Acquia is a natural extension of what I have already been doing in the Drupal community (I can’t wait to deliver some of my security talks). Also, Drupal is gradually turning towards more enterprise direction, and Acquia is the right guide and reference for this purpose.

There are two essential elements of Drupal development - the community side, and the enterprise side, and both need to walk hand-in-hand to move things even further and Drupal to succeed. Acquia represents the ideal platform to connect and unite these two factors and the possibilities are really endless.

So now back to Acquia's quest of Europe: Acquia in Europe is a natural extension of operations that were started in 2008 in US. After all, one continent can never be enough :)
We are building Europe-based support centre with strong language base (there are over 20 officially spoken languages in the EU only). The two most important task of my services team will be:

to help clients and partners to successfully initiate and complete their Drupal projects.

provide Jim Shaw and his business development unit with technical advisory on all requests he handles.

I mentioned partners. Acquia Partners will be the key to our success in Europe. We already have a lot of partners and met a few of them to touch base about ideas on promoting Acquia and Drupal. We plan to do even more in next couple of weeks. Remember, our key goal is to make the Drupal pie grow bigger, not to bite a larger part of it (I would especially appreciate if the pie were actually a cheesecake).

So, as you can probably tell, all this is very new, very challenging and yet so exciting, so if you’d like to touch base about anything and happen to be in London, get in touch and we can meet together and discuss any plans. (If you happen to be at Drupal DevDays in Brussels 4-6th Feb 2011, we can do the same.)

And on that note, its time to end today. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter: @jakubsuchy and checkout our careers page as we are looking for more rock stars in Europe.